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If there is anyone left who doesn’t yet think that Urashima Tarō is a jerk for cheating on Otohime with a prostitute, today’s post will fix that. In the illustration below, the signpost near Urashima Tarō reads, “Right: Genbē Channel, Left: Tennōzu.” It’s oddly specific about where this page’s events take place. Tennōzu is off the coast of Shinagawa, a place which was famous for sillago fishing. Today it’s a stylish and artsy downtown waterfront neighborhood.

I love that the fish nightwatchmen have lanterns. It’s just like how the people at undersea Nakazu’s sideshows were wondering if the clam mirage was a candlelight projection trick. There seems to be no acknowledgment that fire won’t work underwater, just like we’re asked to accept that people with fish on top of their heads = actual fish. Maybe I’m just weird, but that always makes me laugh.

Urashima Tarō knew that if Otohime’s father the Dragon King ever found out about the child there would be big trouble, so he secretly threw the baby away into the sea.

“Ah, if I didn’t belong to the Dragon Palace’s court, I would raise you myself and put you in a freak show in Fukiyachō or Ryōgoku. I’m sure I could make some money that way… It’s such a shame, but I have to throw you away. When you grow up, take care not to get caught by one of the bad freak shows!”

Some fish nightwatchmen who were patrolling the sea nearby heard the baby mermaid’s cries.

“Hey, I can hear a baby! Hurry up and bring the lantern over here!”

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Like yesterday’s page, today’s page is full of absurdities. Kyōden’s hyperbolic metaphors for the depth of love between man and fish are splendid, and feel more like something that was written today than over 200 years ago.

The love between man and carp was deeper than the toilets at Shinagawa-juku¹; deeper than the wells at Kōjimachi²; deeper than an indigo cloth which has been died indigo again. They seriously considered running away in secret and starting a new life together… until one day the carp became pregnant. Urashima Tarō was completely at a loss over whether to keep the child or not; but eventually, Orino gave birth to a baby girl. Because it was the child of a man and a carp, it was born with the body of a fish and the head of a human. In other words, it was a mermaid.

1. Shinawaga-juku was one of the famous 53 stations along the Tōkaidō road that connected Edo to Kyōtō. The toilets at the station were built out over the water and emptied straight into the sea far below.
2. Kōjimachi was an area of high elevation, so the wells had to be dug deep. The phrase “the wells of Kōjimachi” was a figure of speech meaning extremely deep or even bottomless.

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Pages 4 and 5 are depicted below. The illustration shows Urashima Tarō and Orino flirting in an expensive, private, 2nd floor brothel room. Fishing gear, take-out noodles, a tobacco tray and sake decanter are scattered about the room. The brothel madame (an elderly catfish) is coming up the stairs with tea.

Urashima Tarō and Orino spent many hours together. They joked about whether they should commit lovers’ suicide or not, or whether he should cook her or boil her, and so on.

Urashima Tarō: “Do you really love me? You may be a fish, but don’t make a fool out of me.”

Orino: “If you doubt me that much, you can turn me into sashimi¹ and see my true heart. I prayed to Kinkō Sennin² that my love for you would be returned, and I even swore never to eat rakugan³ again. Even if my body were sliced into thin strips of sashimi and eaten with roasted sake, my heart is unchanging, like a fish boiled in miso soup. My heart is like water dammed up behind the Dragon Gate⁴; it wants to leap out like a dragon and fly to be by your side. As such, I feel like I could become a flying dragon. The love that comes from the underwater kingdom is as deep and profound as the bottom of the sea.”

1. The text lays the puns on thick, playing with different types of carp-based dishes and the fact that koi (carp) and koi (romance) are homophones. Most of the jokes get lost in translation, sadly.
2. Kinkō Sennin (Chinese: Qin Gao) was a wizard from ancient Chinese folklore who was able to ride on the back of a carp like it was a horse.
3. Rakugan is a colorful sweet. In this case, she swore it off as a payment for the wish she made.
4. An ancient Chinese myth says that a carp who is able to swim up a waterfall to the Dragon Gate at the top of the Yellow River would transform into a dragon.

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Pages 4 and 5 of Hakoiri musume are presented with a two-page spread illustration, so I am sharing both pages below. Note how once again the fish characters are portrayed as humans with fish sitting on top of their heads. This served multiple purposes—not only was it easier for an artist to portray posts, emotions, and movement by using familiar human forms; it also allowed artists to sneak in caricatures or cameos of famous people and celebrities into their work!

Thus, Nakazu once again became part of the world of the Dragon Palace. It prospered, and was full of beautiful teahouse girls¹, called shigoku², who were so popular that goldfish and silverfish³ flocked to the neighborhood.

This is where that famous playboy Urashima Tarō⁴ liked to visit–I’m sure you all know his story. He was the lover of the princess Otohime, daughter of Dragon King Shakatsura II, Bakatsura Ryūō⁵. Urashima Tarō had grown a bit bored of the beautiful Otohime, and he secretly began visiting brothels in Nakazu. He fell in love with a courtesan named Orino, who belonged to a brothel called Tonegawaya⁶, and was considered exceptionally beautiful even among the shigoku.

1. There’s often confusion over the difference between hanamachi and yūkaku, or geisha and sex workers, or what is a legitimate tea house and what is a “tea house.” But banish that confusion, because in this story, teahouse girls definitely means prostitutes!
2. The real Nakazu was full of inexpensive, unlicensed prostitutes. These women were called jigoku (“hell”) in the local slang. But in the undersea world where everything seems topsy-turvy, Nakazu is full of shigoku (“the best”), who are exceptionally beautiful fish prostitutes.
3. In the neighborhood of Ryōgoku in Edo there were unlicensed, cheap prostitutes who were nicknamed gold cats and silver cats. Because this story takes place under water Kyōden changed cats to fish, and once again flipped what was unpopular on land into something very popular in the undersea world.
4. Urashima Tarō is one of Japanese folklore’s most well-known figures. No reader would have been unfamiliar with his story. You can read about him in countless books and webpages. (One of my favorite jokes in this book is how Kyōden has turned Urashima Tarō from a beloved children’s hero into a gigolo and a bit of a jerk. He’s essentially a kept man, a lover of a princess who is too low of rank to marry her, but he mooches off of his royal connections and runs around like a playboy.)
5. Shakatsura is one of the Dragon Kings in Buddhist scripture. Shakara, Sakara, and Bakara are some of the variations of his name in Japanese, but I just went with how it was written in this book. His Indian/Sanskrit name is Sāgara.
6. Orino’s name means carp, written in the flowery and fashionable style that courtesans used for their business names. The Tone River was famous for its carp, and similarly the Tonegawaya brothel was famous for Orino. She was the most beautiful fish in all of Nakazu.

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Today’s post is page 3 of Hakoiri musume. The illustration on pages 2 and 3 forms a double page spread, so I am including the scan on both page below for refence.

The illustration below has a number of great things to look at. One thing of note is how sea creatures were drawn in the Edo Period. Each of the characters in the illustration below is not a human, but a fish. Note the animals on top of their heads denoting what kind of fish they are. This is not unique to Kyōden; this is how most artists illustrated anthropomorphized fish. In fact you can see this trend all over Japanese art. Next time you look at statuary or illustrations, look carefully above their heads. You may learn that what you think is a person is actually a dragon or some other creature simply being expressed in human form!

In commemoration of its opening, and with permission from the Dragon King, a freak show, a theater, a teahouse, a shooting gallery, etc. were built in the undersea Nakazu Shinchi. It is just as crowded and popular as it was when the human Nakazu Shinchi was built. Sea lion performed acrobatics, flying fish walked on tightropes, clams blew mirages¹, and octopuses played one-man-bands². People crowded around trying to make money with various spectacles. Money is good all the way down to the bottom of the sea.

Fish #1: “Was that a real clam making the mirage, or was it just a trick projection with a candle?”

Fish #2: “Can you really staff a brothel with only blowfish³? I think I’ll go fire off a shot…⁴”

1. In Japanese folklore, mirages at sea are said to be images of the Dragon King’s palace breathed out of the mouths of giant clams. The word for mirage, shinkirō, means “clam breath castle.” The man on the far left is pointing to an image of a clam mirage, and spectators wonder if it’s really a mirage or a trick projection on a screen with a candle.
2. I translated this as “one man band,” but it’s not the same as what we know as a one man band in English. The Japanese term in hachiningei, which means “eight man performance,” referring to one man performing the work of eight. This works well for an octopus with its eight limbs. (The large signs in the foreground advertise the sea lion acrobatics and octopus one-man-band.)
3. This is an exquisitely multi-layered pun. Blowfish must be sliced carefully to avoid the deadly neurotoxin in their meat. The cheapest back-alley brothels in Edo’s red-light districts were tiny rows of dirty rooms called kirimise (“sliced shops”) because of how narrow they were. They sold sex at half the usual price: 100 mon, which coincidentally sounds just like the word for a bullet. A slang term for blowfish is teppō (“gun”), while “firing off a shot” is slang for sex. These extremely cheap brothels were said to be good only for a single “shot;” you’d never go back twice. When this fish says that he wants to fire off a shot, it sounds like he wants to visit the shooting range, but he’s really talking about visiting the cheapest blowfish brothel around. Finally, there is the association of the blowfish’s deadly neurotoxin with diseases like syphilis which one picks up at a cheap brothel. In Japanese, the same verb (ataru) is used to mean contracting a disease from a brothel, as well as eating a piece of poisoned blowfish—and also shooting a target with a gun!
4. On the far right of the illustration there is an archery hut. These were ostensibly places to go fire arrows like a carnival shooting gallery. But they were staffed by sexy, flirty young women, who were as much of an attraction as the archery. It was an open secret that sex was for sale as well. Just look at the elderly fish heading to the archery range—I don’t think he’s going there to shoot arrows.

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As I explained earlier, I will be presenting Hakoiri musume menya ningyo one page at a time. However, some of the illustrations in the book are two-page spreads—like today’s for example. I am still presenting the text one page at a time, but I will share the full spread on both days to avoid disrespecting the illustrations.

Today’s illustration depicts the Dragon King. He is the god of the ocean realm, and rules everything under the water. He lives in a great palace called Ryūgūjō at the bottom of the sea. My illustration is based on statues of the Dragon King and other gods on display at Sanjūsangendō.

“The river never stops flowing, yet the water we see flowing in front of us is not the same water. The bubbles that float on the surface disappear here and reappear there, and do not remain in the same state.” So wrote Kamo no Chōmei in Hōjōki six hundred years¹ ago, yet it is just as true today. Nakazu Shinchi² has returned to its original flow, but the reality is that land becomes water, water becomes land, and so forth, changing over and over faster than a peep show³. Oh no! I didn’t mean to sound so rhetorical!

Anyway, just like that, Nakazu, which belonged to the human world until yesterday, has become submerged and from today is back under control of the Dragon King.

1. Hōjōki is a collection of Buddhist essays written in 1212 CE. Nearly 600 years ago from Kyōden’s perspective in 1791.
2. Nakazu Shinchi was a downtown section of Edo about 1000 square meters in size. It was built in 1771 by land reclamation where the Sumida River met the Hakozaki River. The village of Tominaga was built on this land, and became a prosperous district full of homes, shops, and unlicensed prostitutes. It was demolished and turned back into river land in the first year of Kansei (1789), thus “returning to its original flow.”
3. This refers to mechanical nozoki karakuri peep shows found at sideshows and spectacles which were all the rage at the time. These shows were where you’d see things like petrified mermaids and other yōkai, so this plays right into the mermaid theme of the book.

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Hakoiri musume menya ningyo begins with a single-page foreword by the publisher–or so the author would have us believe. The story itself doesn’t properly begin until page 2, but the foreword is as much a part of the author’s narrative as the story itself, and it’s entertaining as well.

Since page 1 is not part of the story, today’s illustration (above) is just a mermaid courtesan read Hakoiri musume. It has nothing to do with the story other than  being thematically related.

Warmest greetings,

I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to my readers for your continued patronage and support.

The author of this work, Kyōden, has written many books for you to read; but it is utter foolishness to squander time and paper on a joke of a book like this. Last spring in particular, he lost all motivation after being slammed by the public¹, and he told us flatly this year that he would never write again. Our sales, which have relied upon Kyōden’s books, were sure to plummet. I asked him if he could write just one book this year as a favor to me. Kyōden could not refuse his long-time friend, and agreed to write one more piece.

This illustrated novelette is the work that he created. I hope that our readers will see our advertisements and order a copy.

Kansei 3, New Year’s Day²
Publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō³

1. Kokubyaku mizukagami, a kibyōshi by Ishibe Kinkō, was banned by the government in 1789 because it discussed the 1784 murder of Tanuma Okitomo by Sano Masakoto. Santō Kyōden, who worked on the book as an illustrator, was also fined.

2. This date uses the old Japanese calendar; the Gregorian calendar date equals the spring of 1791.

3. The foreword is signed Tsutaya Jūzaburō, who was the publisher of the book. He was a famous publisher and patron of the arts, and was known as “the man with the big belly” for his magnanimity. He was the publisher who introduced the world to Tōshūsai Sharaku, the famous “phantom” ukiyoe artist. He also introduced the world to Kitao Masanobu, a relatively unknown ukiyoe artist at the time (who happened to actually be a pen name for Santō Kyōden). However, this foreword was actually written by Kyōden as part of the work itself. Kyōden is joking that he was trying to practice self-restraint after receiving a fine for his previous work, but the publisher begged him to write this so he had no choice.